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The Mobile Web Will Be Just Fine

This is an idea that we hear a bunch. The web on mobile is a slow terrible mess and it's not worth your investment if you are a start up. And, as you could have guessed by the title of this post, it's also not quite it. The reality is that there is one thing the web is significantly better at than apps, and that is reaching a wider audience.

The Mobile Web Will Be Just Fine

There is a stat that gets thrown around that paints the picture: the average mobile user visits 12 - 20 unique apps every month, whereas they visit around 100 unique websites in the same timeframe. That is a 5 - 8x jump in visibility for your hypothetical program by choosing the web over native on mobile. It’s something that I heard a lot last year, and with all the hubbub about the app bubble apparently bursting, who knows if the discrepancy is even bigger now.

The Mobile Web Will Be Just Fine

Why does this happen? Simply put, it's due to friction. If you think about what it takes to download an app, you have to go to the app store, search for the app, enter your password, download the app, and only then can you use it. Sounds minuscule? Possibly for you, but the fact is that each one of those steps means users lost, about 20% each according to this post from a product manager at Google (he was not working with Google at the time of this post being written).

The Mobile Web Will Be Just Fine

That isn’t to say that native applications are irredeemable; stats show they are more often to be used for longer periods of time (i.e. Looking at YouTube videos for hours on end) and sometimes mass shareability is not a crucial use case for an application (i.e. Snapchat, Whatsapp)